1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is directed to a system and process for tagging documents or other electronic content in order to facilitate later searching and retrieval.
2. Description of the Related Art
With respect to medical information generated during a patient encounter, documents and other content often are coded using language or codes mandated by insurance companies in order to facilitate billing and payment. These practices are useful for the insurance companies, but they may rely on non-medical terminology that is unnatural for medical professionals.
In addition, reference documents that the practitioner may want to provide to the patient often are not created using this coding, so it may making it harder to retrieve the content when desired. In an age where reference documents are created, transmitted, and stored electronically, a practitioner may be aware of only a small number of relevant documents. This disparity may impact the practitioner negatively by denying or limiting access to relevant, helpful content. For example, it may make it more difficult, time consuming, and/or costly to find the specific document or documents that are desired.
Moreover, in relatively complex fields, providers express their intent in many different ways. For example, in the medical field, that variability of intent may be reflected by the potential number of terms in a terminology being in the hundreds of thousands. When considering both the number of documents that may be available and the number of descriptions that may be present in those documents, the scope of locating one or more desired documents may be better appreciated.
What is needed is a system or process that makes searching for documents or other electronic content easier and overcomes the drawbacks described above.